Great Books

Best New Games is the only book available that presents New Games. These cooperative, interactive games are for groups of all ages and abilities—and they’re meant to be played just for fun. Author Dale Le Fevre is a leading authority on New Games. In many of his workshops, traditionally adversarial groups have come together to play and have fun: Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East; Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; mixed races in South Africa; and Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Croatia and Serbia. In Best New Games, Le Fevre presents the most popular New Games (including many recently found games) from more than 25 years of presenting. This complete resource makes creating play sessions effortless. You’ll find an easy-to-use Gamefinder that helps you quickly select the ideal game for your particular situation, plus tips to give you confidence and increase your effectiveness in leading the games. The author’s stories of firsthand experiences demonstrate the impact that New Games can have in building cooperation, teamwork, and common understanding. Best New Games is a great resource for anyone involved with groups—at any level and in any setting. Use New Games to create opportunities for people of all ages and abilities to have fun together while being physically and mentally active.

Michael Watkins’s bestselling book The First 90 Days has become the business bible for accelerating leadership transitions. Now, Watkins zeroes in on the most critical skill leaders must master in order to secure new roles and accelerate their transitions: negotiation. In Shaping the Game: The New Leader’s Guide to Effective Negotiating, Watkins draws from extensive research and practical consulting work to reveal four fundamental objectives that should guide new leaders’ actions in every negotiation they undertake: create the most possible value; capture that value for yourself and your company; carefully tend to key relationships; and preserve your reputation. Watkins lays out hands-on strategies for becoming a world-class negotiator, including how to match your negotiation strategy to the situation, influence the perspectives of key counterparts, shape negotiation outcomes in your favor, and create the learning discipline necessary to become a world-class negotiator. Navigating the myriad complex, high-stakes negotiating challenges that confront new leaders, this book provides all the tools readers need to make the right moves up the career ladder--and succeed in those roles once they get there.

Same Game New Rules: Contemporary Insights For The Advanced Sales Professional Paperback Book – 201 pgs. From the Author: Tired of The Same, Worn-Out Sales Training? As President of Caskey Achievement Strategies, I've had the opportunity to coach, train, and speak to over 10,000 Sales Professionals and Executives, and I've personally given over 3,000 workshops. I've seen people come through our programs, learn our method, learn about psychology, learn about human behavior and about themselves, and go to the market place and blow the lid off of their revenue and income numbers. And they would have no trouble eating the big guys for lunch with whom they were competing. After graduating DePauw University in 1978, I spent a great deal of time watching weak, almost sad sales approaches and tactics being used by what you and I would consider Top Flight companies. I watched these people and their selling approaches—then I would look at the training they were getting and the books that most of corporate America was reading, and it became apparent that as a society, we aren’t teaching much value to today's sales force. I didn't like the manipulative approach forced upon me in Selling 101. It just didn't fit. I was tired of the same, worn-out sales training that seemed so pervasive in the market place. So, for the last 10 years, I've been on a personal mission to write sales development content with not only mass appeal but with integrity. In Same Game, New Rules, I've documented a contemporary strategy and philosophy that gives the power to you without sacrificing your dignity in the sales process. You will learn how to think about selling, achieving, negotiating, and communicating. Each of the 23 Insights within the book are pulled from actual workshops with clients and comes with an action plan to help you implement them in your world. My goal for you is to work smarter, not harder... earning more income, not less. And it's not just for sales people. In fact, over 50% of people in business have client contact and do their part to translate corporate value. If you're in front line sales, customer service, or technical support, you will learn by reading this book. Why You Should Read This Book Same Game, New Rules is for anyone in the sales and marketing profession searching for an easier, softer, more effective way to build their income. Each day in the US alone, more than 25 million people are responsible in some way for their company’s revenue or client satisfaction. These are the sales people, account developers, attorneys, engineers, managers, accountants, project heads, doctors and thousands of other professionals. Every day these people have conversations with their prospects and clients about their business. Same Game, New Rules is also for people in one or more of these categories. • Those who have seen the one-day seminars, have bought the books, have listened to the tapes of the greatest speakers in the world — and yet, are still looking for that one philosophy or approach that will fit their style. • People who want their selling method to support their personal strength, yet not compromise their dignity or that of their prospects. • Companies with sales people who are, in a large part, responsible for the success and future of their companies. Same Game, New Rules is for those who want to help manage themselves and their sales process by using a systematic and contemporary method. Quite simply, it is for those pioneers who dare to be different. If You’re a Sales Professional . . . You are being hit with higher quotas, more responsibilities (more planning, project management, tracking of prospects and clients etc.,) and non-selling activities. That means when you’re in front of your prospect, you have to be extra effective. Marketing departments aren’t providing the leads they should, so it’s left up to the sales team to generate their own leads. You must be part marketer, part relationship developer, part closer, and part CEO. You have your hands full with customers who want more for less and company people who still don’t see the value you bring. You have it extra tough. We’ll help. If You’re an Owner . . . You are looking to get paid more for the value that you’ve created in your business. Yes, you can continue to put systems in place that deliver more value for your clients and customers, but you also must have a system which helps your people translate the value you’ve already built. If you have 100 units of value but your sales team is only able to translate 70% of that, then you will see selling cycles lengthen, discounting continue, and you will experience a general under-utilization of your sales asset—your sales force. Everything in this book is written with the intent of helping you and your people develop a strategy for translating or communicating your value in a manner that helps you get paid for that value in the marketplace.

Space Invaders and Asteroids are back! Loved that Atari(r) when you were a kid? So did Ben Heckendorn - so much, in fact, that he successfully resurrected it as a slim, go-anywhere portable. When Playstation(r) and Nintendo(r) aficionados got jealous, he created miniaturized, fully functioning, battery-powered versions of those too. Now it's your turn. Every secret is here - complete instructions, materials lists, tool tips, even advice on finding parts. Just wait 'til they see this at the high school reunion. Ready? Let's get started Plans and instructions for building eight handheld, classic video games * Choosing a game system - Atari(r), Nintendo(r), Super Nintendo(r), or Playstation(r)1 * What you'll spend * Electronics and soldering 101 * Hacking portable TVs for their screens * Building the case - CNC or freehand? * Yank the cord, install the batteries

Sports in America, particularly big-time collegiate and professional sports, have never been more popular. Modern sports events bring us breathtaking demonstrations of grace and power and provide the focal point for the leisure time of hundreds of thousands of Americans. But the world of sports is also increasingly a scene of moral corruption and physical abuse. In A Whole New Ball Game, Allen Guttmann examines the American fascination with sport and what that fascination reveals about our culture.Like the transformation of American society in the twentieth century, the modernization of American sports has seemed inevitable and ubiquitous. As Guttmann shows, American sports reflect American culture: our sports are secular, bureaucratic, and specialized, and as part of our democratic society, they require at least in theory an equality among competitors. The rules of modern sports reflect their evolution from earlier, less differentiated games. To master the skills required by modern sports, athletes train scientifically, employing the most technologically advanced equipment. And, like almost every other aspect of our lives, sports are quantified: our athletes and the media are almost obsessed with records.In tracing the development of modern sports in America from the rituals of pre-Columbian cultures to the late-1980s in this book, Guttmann discusses the failure of colonial New England and the antebellum South to influence the evolution of sports. He shows how baseball, a sport that combines premodern and modern characteristics, performed important social functions, helping to Americanize generations of immigrants. Examining basketball as the archetypal modern sport, Guttmann discusses its invention in the YMCA and its vulnerablity to corruption by gamblers, and he provocatively reviews the transformation of informal chlidren's play into adult-sponsored leagues.One chapter of this important study offers and engrossing account of the female athletes's transition from social outcast to superstar; another scrutinizes the failure to achieve racial equality in sports. Guttmann also presents a scathing analysis of the destruction of the athlete's body through drug use and an examination of the search for alternative forms of physical activity. A Whole New Ball Game demonstrates conclusively that sports are an integral part of modern society and that, taken as a whole, they may be the best indicators we have of who we are as a people.

In the tradition of The Prize, Lutz Kleveman gives us the twenty-first-century chapter on the history, passion, and politics of oil and gas resources, and the struggle to control them in a critical part of the world. Using the concept of the "Great Game" that Rudyard Kipling immortalized in his novel Kim, Kleveman argues that there is now a new Great Game in the region, a modern variant of the nineteenth-century clash of imperial ambitions of Great Britain and Tsarist Russia. Traveling thousands of miles, from Turkmenistan (where statues of the country's leader are made of gold and line the thoroughfares) to the Afghan Hindu Kush, Kleveman met with the principal Great Game actors between Kabul and Moscow: oil barons, generals, diplomats, and warlords. Based on extensive research and travel in the Caucasus, the Caspian, and Central Asia, The New Great Game is a thrilling travel narrative through one of the world's last unexplored frontiers, and a savvy and incisive analysis of the power struggle for the world's remaining energy resources.

All the instructions, strategies, and tactics for every family's favorite games in one authoritative, fully illustrated volume, including more than 40 games not in the original edition and an entire new chapter on the African board game, Mancale. Much more than a compilation of rote instructions, the lively text captures the rich lore and history behind games.

This enormous compendium of rules, variants, strategies and histories is enough to make any game enthusiast's eyes widen with excitement. Even for so large a volume, The New Games Treasury contains a jaw-dropping amount of information. More than 500 games are covered, ranging from the ancient (chess and go) to the modern (Scrabble and Monopoly). The book doesn't limit itself to just board and card games. You'll even find the rules for darts, softball, and jacks; even tag and 20 questions are given their due. Each game description starts with a quick summary of the important details--how many can play, the equipment needed, complexity and duration, etc.--and then explains the rules in a manner that's both clear and thorough. Many descriptions are accompanied by notes about the game's lineage, and beautiful illustrations are found throughout the volume. Where other guides give you the bread and butter of games, The New Games Treasury provides you with the whole seven courses and insists that you stay for dessert. It is highly recommended. --Matthew Baldwin